2069: A Sex Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1974): Five Venusian travel to Earth to track down sperm to bring life to their female only planet. They land in a small Bavarian town where they are mistaken for French Olympians training for the ski team. They quickly find that their plan to hook the local men up to milking machines is not as efficient or fun as having sex with them. From there, there are numerous sex scenes with an abundance of gratuitous nudity. I'm really confused by this one. What were Kubrick and Clarke thinking with this sequel? This was nothing like their first film. There were no monoliths and it never even gives you a hint at the meaning of the space baby from the original. As a heterosexual man, I appreciated all the uh...mise en scène, but it was pretty silly. I've got to call this a rare misstep for the maestro.
Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo, 2016): Gloria (Anne Hathaway) loses her job in NYC and moves back to her small hometown. There she encounters Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood friend, and begins working at his bar. Around that time a giant monster begins destroying Seoul Godzilla style. Initially shocked by the event, Gloria quickly realizes that the monster in South Korea responds to her movements when she is in her town's park. Soon a giant robot responsive to Oscar appears in Seoul as well, but as he begins a downward spiral he presents a bigger threat to denizens of the city than Gloria who has a new sense of responsibility. It's not exactly clear to me that this qualifies as science fiction, but with the wide net cast on page one of this thread, I suppose it fits. The film was...okay, I guess. It was an interesting premise from writer/director Nacho Vigalondo, but it seemed to frequently get bogged down into the mumblecore trappings of Millennial ennui. I wouldn't call it bad, but maybe bland.
Death Race (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2008): Speaking of bad, Armond White's golden boy, Paul W.S. Anderson defiles the memory of Paul Bartel's 1975 masterpiece Death Race 2000 by stripping away everything that made it great and leaving behind a soulless, boring husk of a movie. This one begins with the death of racer Frankenstein, the star of the original, but just a faceless stand in in this iteration. As a response, evil prison warden Hennessey (a slumming Joan Allen) arranges for the murder of Jensen Ames's (Jason Statham) wife and his wrongful conviction for it so that he can become the new Frankenstein. From there, it's just one empty, poorly choreographed race after another without any rhyme, reason, or purpose beyond the spectacle of it all. No character is believable here, and nothing matters. With apologies to Tyrese Gibson, there will only ever be one Machine Gun Joe.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Alexander Witt, 2004): Speaking of Paul W.S. Anderson trash, I saw his adaptation of Resident Evil when it came out in theaters during the early part of the century. I hated it so much that I never bothered to check out any of its sequels. That's why I was gobsmacked when Slant named Resident Evil: Retribution as one of their 100 best sci-fi films ever made. I encountered another list that called that entry one of the best films of 2012, so I decided to go through the series and see what I thought. This time Anderson handles writing duties, but leaves the direction up to frequent second unit director Alexander Witt. Milla Jovovich returns as ex-Umbrella security agent Alice, but is now joined by Raccoon City police officer Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory). The infection leaks above ground in this one, leaving the city's residents in a mad dash to flee. Those that stay behind are transformed into the living dead that can be easily killed with a bullet to the head or, uh..having their necks broken. Alice and Jill are on the hunt for the daughter of an Umbrella scientist who didn't make it out during the evacuation, but are being stalked by the Nemesis (Matthew G. Taylor) a half cyborg/zombie crossbreed that carries a rail gun and a missile launcher with him wherever he goes. Does this sound stupid to you? I guarantee that my description does not adequately convey the level of mind boggingly awfulness of the script. It's the kind of movie where every heroine is constantly kicking zombies in the head with a "woosh" sound effect added in. As a pubescent 12-year-old, I fell in love with Jovovich after seeing her in Return to the Blue Lagoon and Chaplin. Even remembering that long ago crush couldn't make me stomach this. Retribution better be worth it, because, dear God, I don't know how many more of these I can handle.
The World, The Flesh and The Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959): Harry Belafonte plays Ralph Burton a coal miner stuck underground for several days. No one comes to help him, and when he finally manages to extricate himself he finds an abandoned town with newspapers reporting on a nuclear war with their final editions. He gets a car and makes his way East to New York, where he spends several weeks alone looking for survivors. Eventually, Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens) comes across him and the two form a fast friendship. Matters are complicated, however, when a third survivor, Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer) cruises into the city's port after spending months at sea. Benson is triggered by the man to woman ratio, and wants to kill Ralph as a way to solve it. For his part, Ralph is fine to leave Sarah and him together, but Benson won't let it be and hunts Ralph through the streets with a rifle. I know that I played the sci-fi gatekeeper earlier, but again, this felt about as science fiction the scenario in On the Beach. Both things could happen, but we don't really need to modify our existing technology in any way to do it. Oh well. I'd call it more interesting than it was memorable. It's not bad, but just not one that would ever make it onto my list.
The World's End (Edgar Wright, 2013): 40-something-year-old man child Gary King (Simon Pegg) still lives in the halcyon days of his teenage years when he and his mates attempted a pub crawl that would have seen them go to 12 different bars in one night. His inability to complete it has been Gary's single greatest regret in his whole life, so 25 years later, he tries to get his friends Andy (Nick Frost), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine), and Peter (Eddie Marsan) to recreate that night with a successful end at the pub called The World's End. Things are slightly off as they return to the town, but when Gary gets into a fight with a local teenager, he knocks his head off its socket and a blue liquid pours out. Soon enough they realize that almost all of the town's population has been replaced by alien replicants, and that they could very well be next. I expected the one liners going in, but didn't know too much about the plot or see the expertly executed fight sequences coming. Wright is a master visual storyteller, and his editing skills are on full display here. Alternating between hilarity and heartbreak, puns and pathos, the film masterfully handles all of its elements. It's a strong contender for my list.
The X from Outer Space (Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968): When Criterion first released Eclipse Series 37: When Horror Came to Shochiku, I watched and enjoyed Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell on Hulu and loved the campy monster tale. So, I was excited about going back to visit the remaining films in the set. I began with The X from Outer Space, and am sad to report that its a major step down in quality from Goke. In this film, a group of international astronauts lift off from Tokyo for a manned mission in outer space. There they encounter a meteor that has some strange glowing rocks on it. They take one back to Earth, where it's revealed to be a spore that hatches while burning through the lower floors like Alien would do less than a decade later. The spore grows into a giant beaked kaiju that ravages the city in a monster suit. It's kind of like Godzilla, but dumber and less threatening. Nothing in the movie makes any sense whatsoever, and special effects actually look worse than they did 13 years earlier in Godzilla. Maybe you can enjoy its camp value, but I could not find one single redeeming feature in it.
